First step to sustainability

MARIAN SCOTT, The Gazette04.20.2007

Our newsprint supplier, White Birch meets the Forest Stewardship Council standard which means that the forest management approach and techniques of their wood chips supplier meet the highest standards in the industry. Our newsprint is made exclusively from post-production wood chips, not from trees.

Dawn isn't yet seeping through the curtains when a faint thud tells me a rolled-up Gazette has landed on my doorstep.

Most days, I roll over and drift back to sleep until the alarm blares.

But last Saturday was different.

I was sprinting through the early-morning drizzle after Gabriel, my paper carrier, as he deftly tucked weekend inserts into newspapers, inserted them in plastic bags and hurled them at my neighbours' doorways.

Gabriel's paper route is one link in a chain of events that make it possible for you and me to unfold The Gazette at the breakfast table.

The newspaper you're reading is the product of a journey that starts in the boreal forest, hundreds of kilometres northwest of Montreal, and ends when you and I toss yesterday's news into the recycling bin. Whereupon, in most cases, it begins a new journey, perhaps one day to land on another reader's doorstep.

Together, the steps in that voyage add up to The Gazette's ecological footprint.

Today, we measure our footprint.

University of British Columbia ecologist Bill Rees coined the term ecological footprint in 1992 as a way of measuring humans' impact on the environment. It calculates the land a population would need to produce the resources it consumes and absorb its wastes.

But a business is a little different.

"You have to do a full life-cycle analysis," Rees advised when consulted on how to assess The Gazette's footprint.

A life-cycle analysis evaluates a product's environmental burden by measuring the resources used and the waste it generates.

So we looked at every aspect of our business: printing, distribution, advertising sales and newsgathering.

We checked the heating bills for our printing plant and downtown office and counted everything from newsprint - 15,000 metric tonnes this year - to the 61,500 Styrofoam cups used in our coffee machines.

What did we learn?

The biggest part of our footprint - by far - is paper.

The newsprint in one year's worth of The Gazette consumes the equivalent of 186,816 trees.

To produce that much newsprint uses enough energy to heat 2,472 homes for a year and enough water to fill 272 swimming pools, and emits as much carbon dioxide (C02) as 1,500 cars.

Why are we looking at ourselves this closely?

Almost daily, this newspaper reports some new warning that ecological catastrophe looms unless the world takes drastic action to stop climate change.

This month, in the most comprehensive scientific report to date on the impacts of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Brussels predicted rising temperatures will cause hunger, floods, drought, avalanches, and the extinction of as much as

30 per cent of species.

From smog warnings in February to sweltering summers, weird weather to dropping water levels in local lakes and rivers, signs of global warming are all around us.

Canadians haven't been this worried about the environment since the late 1980s, according to a recent online survey of 3,698 adults by Angus Reid Strategies. It found 77 per cent of Canadians - and 83 per cent of Quebecers - believe global warming is real.

But while we in newspapers have been quick to report scientists' wakeup call - and the resulting rise in what therapists are calling "eco-anxiety" - we're slower to scrutinize our own impact on the environment.

Five years ago, The Guardian in Britain became the first newspaper in the world to undergo an independent audit of its environmental, social and ethical practices.

"News people are always exposing wrongdoing and gaps in everyone else," said Jo Confino, executive editor and head of sustainable development at the liberal-minded paper, which is owned by an independent trust.

"Very rarely do they turn the spotlight on themselves."

Sustainability is defined as meeting today's needs without depleting the Earth's ability to provide for future generations.

Last year, Time Inc. became one of the first North American media outlets to shine a light on its own impact.

The magazine giant teamed up with the Heinz Centre, a Washington, D.C., think tank, to measure the carbon footprint of two of its titles, Time and In Style. David

Refkin, director of sustainable development for Time, estimated C02 emission for a single copy of Time to be about 132 grams.

Time Inc.'s upfront approach to its environmental impact and its efforts to better suppliers' forestry practices are a selling point with advertisers, Refkin said.

"With all the news about climate change, a lot of companies want to let the consumer know they're part of the solution, not part of the problem," he said.

"We are attracting advertisers who want to do business with like-minded companies."

But most newspapers remain wary of exposing their environmental practices to scrutiny, said Tracy London, a newspaper campaigner with Markets Initiative, a non-profit organization that promotes forest-friendly practices in publishing and print media.

"There's a little bit of conservatism in not wanting to be the first one to step out."

Conservatism is perhaps not misplaced in an industry that's been around longer than Canada. The Gazette, founded in 1778, is the nation's oldest daily, while the weekly Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, dating to 1764, is its oldest surviving paper.

But like it or not, newspapers are in the throes of change, as readers and advertisers migrate to the Web.

For trivia buffs, this was the year the world's oldest newspaper, Sweden's Post-och Inrikes Tidningar (circulation: 1,000), founded in 1645, switched to an online-only format.

Meanwhile, corporations from Alcan to Wal-Mart are becoming greener and leaner, according to the Climate Group, an international non-profit organization that spurs corporate leadership on climate change.

In a report on 137 industry-leading corporations and governments, the group reported participants reduced carbon emissions by an average of 14 per cent while achieving significant cost savings.

"The message that's finally getting through is there's money to be made in sustainability," said environmentalist David Suzuki.

Companies that don't pull up their socks on the environment risk getting their knuckles rapped.

In December, Victoria's Secret bowed to a two-year campaign by ForestEthics, a non-profit group focused on protecting endangered forests, when it promised to stop printing its catalogue on paper containing pulp from an Alberta mill whose practices were said to endanger caribou habitat.

In forestry, a fresh wind of co-operation is sweeping a sector that only a decade ago was wracked by bitter disputes between industry, environmentalists and First Nations communities.

"The really big shift I've seen is less polarization," said Nicole Rycroft, founder and executive director of Markets Initiative, and a long-time activist whose soft accent betrays her Australian roots.

"Now there's more of a realization things need to be different, that we've reached the point we need to change the way we're operating on the planet."

Yet current measures are far from sufficient to avert planetary disaster, warned Rees of the University of British Columbia.

"I believe we're in a state of overshoot," he said, meaning that humanity is using far more resources than the planet can sustain.

Humans' environmental impact has more than tripled since 1961. We are depleting the Earth's renewable resources at an unprecedented rate, using 25 per cent more than what the natural ecosystem can replace, according to the World Wildlife Federation's Living Planet Report for 2006.

The average ecological footprint for Canadians is 7.6 hectares, surpassed only by Americans, at 9.6 hectares. The federation estimates the fair share of the Earth's productive capacity is 1.8 hectares per person. Contrast the average footprint of 0.8 hectares for a resident of India and 1.6 hectares in China.

Rees is skeptical of corporate efforts to be more sustainable.

Even a moderate business-as-usual policy would accelerate damage to the planet, he warned.

"My feeling is most of what we're doing in the name of corporate sustainability doesn't have any effect," he said. "Almost everything the corporate sector is trying to do is increase our efficiency. We're just becoming more efficiently unsustainable."

Suzuki conceded: "There's a lot of greenwashing going on."

And current sustainability targets are probably insufficient anyway, since global warming is already under way, he added.

"I don't know if we even know what sustainability even is any more," Suzuki said.

So where to start?

Educating ourselves is the first step in the sustainability journey, advised Sheldon Zakreski, a senior analyst at Metafore, an organization in Portland, Ore., that promotes environmental responsibility among companies that use forest products.

"Looking bad isn't the worst thing you can do," he noted. "Not knowing is the worst thing you can do."

With guidance from London of Markets Initiative, we followed The Gazette's paper trail from the forest to the paper mill, and from our printing plant to your doorstep.

The ecological journey continues when you discard this paper.

(Or maybe you won't. Fifteen per cent of the paper people use is archived - from your birth certificate to the recipe you clipped last week.)

North Americans have a seemingly insatiable appetite for paper. The paperless office has turned out to be a myth and we're deluged with junk mail.

That sheer abundance is one reason why North America's largest export to China, by weight, is used paper.

Quebecers recycle close to 70 per cent of newspapers and about 60 per cent of printed matter overall, including flyers and magazines.

About one-third of your average tree felled in Canada is used for paper products, Zakreski said.

Humans consume 245 million tonnes of paper worldwide. In the U.S., pulp and paper is the second-largest industrial source of C02 and the third-largest industrial consumer of energy, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

As newspapers trim page size and the number of pages, and as news operations migrate online, newsprint production has declined by 1.7 per cent over the past decade, according to Natural Resources Canada - a concern for the pulp and paper industry, hard hit by mill closures.

But the migration to new media doesn't diminish the importance of this sustainability journey, stressed The Guardian's Confino.

"Clearly, at some point there's likely to be less paper," he said.

"But energy for computers is vastly increasing. The issues don't go away, but they do change."

mascott@thegazette.canwest.com

TOMORROW: Recycling in Montreal. What happens to your paper after you've read it?

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What is an ecological footprint? A carbon footprint?

The ecological footprint is a way of representing humans' impact on the Earth. It calculates the amount of land a given population (a person, city, nation or all of humanity) would need to produce all the renewable resources it consumes and absorb the waste it discards.

If the Earth's resources were shared fairly, each person would have a footprint of 1.8 hectares.

Canadians have an average footprint of 7.6 hectares, second only to Americans, at 9.6.

A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of greenhouse gases produced, measured as units of C02.